August
30, 2012

No Charges Filed on Harsh Tactics Used by
the C.I.A.

By SCOTT SHANE

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner
in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last
possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal
interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.

Mr.
Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding
and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His
announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice
Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence
or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the
abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The closing of the two cases means that the
Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism
programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without
elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation
should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’
treatment and deaths. ......

REVIEW
OF WEINER’S A HISTORY OF THE FBI

Behind the Bureau: On the FBI

J. Edgar Hoover died forty years ago, at the reasonably ripe age of 77. The
timing of his death—a heart attack on May 1, 1972—turned out to be a blessing
and a curse for his historical legacy. Had he lived a few months longer, he
could have become mired in Watergate and been tarnished by the downfall of his
longtime ally Richard Nixon. A few years beyond that and he might have been
hauled before the Church Committee to answer for the civil liberties abuses
committed during his thirty-seven-year tenure at the FBI. His death spared him
the experience of seeing the bureau maligned, denounced and partially
dismantled in the 1970s. But it also made him a poster boy—often rightly,
sometimes wrongly—for all that had gone wrong in American intelligence policy
since the ugly days of the Palmer raids in the wake of World War I. In the four
decades since his death, Hoover
has come in for merciless treatment at the hands of journalists, biographers
and government investigators seeking to expose his secrets and scuff up his
polished public image. Today, most Americans know him best not as the
consummate public servant of FBI lore but as a tyrannical brute and alleged
cross-dresser who spent a lifetime assaulting Americans’ constitutional rights.

At first glance, Tim Weiner’s Enemies
fits comfortably into the tradition of exposé. A longtime intelligence reporter,
Weiner is best known for Legacy of Ashes,
his award-winning 2007 indictment of the CIA’s secret operations since its
founding in the late 1940s. Enemies
promises revelations from never-before-seen FBI files and vows that the truth
about the bureau has—at last—come out. But the truth, it turns out, is rather
messy. Enemies suffers from
one-damned-thing-after-another syndrome, a common hazard with case-based
intelligence histories. The book covers a wide range of issues and contexts,
from the civil liberties violations committed in the bureau’s early years to
World War II espionage on up through the “war on terror.” Weiner seems
determined to judge each episode on its merits, and at its best Enemies is surprisingly evenhanded. But
at its worst, Enemies collapses
under the weight of its internal contradictions. Weiner describes his book as a
study of “a century of constant conflict over the conduct of secret
intelligence in an open democracy.” Unfortunately, Enemies often seems to embody rather than explain that
conflict.

Weiner begins with the founding of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908 and
traces its evolution from a tiny, incompetent band of misfits into the
Hoover-led powerhouse reorganized as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in
1935. From there, he offers a selective and often fascinating journey through
the FBI’s efforts to protect the nation from its alleged “enemies, foreign and
domestic.” Enemies does not
pretend to be an encyclopedic institutional history. Instead Weiner focuses on
the FBI’s intelligence work: ferreting out Russian spies, running American
agents against the Russians in turn, manipulating foreign governments,
investigating terrorism and keeping tabs on that dubious category of
malcontents known as “domestic subversives.” As Weiner notes, the FBI has long
been a hybrid agency: part police force, part secret intelligence bureau. And
we tend to know a lot more about one side of the story than the other. Enemies is an attempt to fill in some of
those gaps.

Weiner summons a blend of well-worn FBI scholarship and new revelations
from declassified intelligence files acquired through the Freedom of
Information Act. The first quarter of the book, which covers the period from
1908 to 1940, draws heavily on the work of such historians as Richard Gid
Powers and Athan Theoharis. During these early years, Weiner writes, the bureau
bounced in and out of secret intelligence work as public opinion, institutional
priorities and presidential directives seemed to demand. In the main, though,
it was a law enforcement agency—and not a terribly good one. The early bureau
failed to solve many of its biggest cases, including the 1920 Wall Street bombing, the era’s worst
terrorist attack. It also bungled its first high-profile campaign against the
communists and anarchists who would become the lifelong focus of Hoover’s domestic
intelligence efforts.

* * *

The Palmer raids of 1919–20 turned out to be a disaster for the bureau.
With the Bolshevik Revolution stirring up fears among some Americans of a
similar revolt at home, the bureau helped round up thousands of alleged
communists, anarchists and other left-wingers, often ignoring the need for
warrants and failing to distinguish between resident aliens and homegrown
radicals. It also lacked the legal authority and the institutional know-how to
carry out a mass deportation effort. In response, the fledgling ACLU joined
forces with some of the nation’s most prominent attorneys to make the case that
the bureau was acting outside the limits of the law. Among those persuaded was
Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, who shut down the bureau’s political
surveillance apparatus upon assuming office in 1924.

The Palmer scandal foreclosed serious domestic intelligence operations for
more than a decade, until Franklin Roosevelt gave the go-ahead for the FBI to
plunge back in. In telling this next chapter of the story, Enemies finally hits its mark. Roosevelt
was cagey with his orders at first, encouraging Hoover to keep an eye on homegrown fascists
and communists as early as 1934 but refusing to put the instructions in
writing. When World War II began five years later, the FBI’s intelligence
mission quickly expanded. In the two years between Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the bureau doubled in size. It also
acquired jurisdiction over espionage, sabotage and “subversion” cases
throughout the Western Hemisphere. Today we
tend to think of the CIA (another product of World War II) as the foreign
intelligence wing, with the FBI mostly limited to domestic soil. During the
1940s, however, the FBI took charge of fully half the world—albeit the half
least engulfed in war.

The FBI’s activities abroad, especially during World War II, are perhaps
the least studied aspect of its history, and Weiner provides a valuable,
detailed and sometimes shocking account of what bureau agents were up to at
that time. Despite its glowing reputation in the 1930s, the FBI was not
particularly well prepared for the exigencies of wartime intelligence work. As
a result, agents assigned to the new Special Intelligence Service, the FBI’s South America division, faced a steep learning curve.
Weiner narrates the war as a series of desperate experiments in spying and
counterspying, with the FBI initially a laughingstock to the more established
diplomatic services. Things got so bad that Hoover
begged to get out of the South America work—one of the “few examples of Hoover offering to cede
power,” as Weiner notes. Roosevelt refused the
request, eager to keep the intelligence services competing with (and often
undermining) one another. So the FBI adapted to the challenge as best it could,
creating a “legal attaché” position that allowed its agents to work with rather
than against the State Department and established a permanent infrastructure
for FBI activities abroad.

One of the dirty secrets of espionage work, Weiner explains, is that
success or failure often depends more on jurisdictional cooperation (or the
lack thereof) than on any given agency’s competence. In one of the book’s best
chapters, Weiner provides a sharp account of Hoover’s attacks on the early CIA as a cabal
of socialists, adventure seekers and clueless intellectuals. “Their use as a
secret intelligence agency in the postwar world [is] inconceivable,” Hoover sputtered to
Truman—with little effect. Hoover
had hoped that Truman would abolish the Office of Strategic Services,
forerunner of the CIA, and place the FBI in charge of global intelligence.
Instead, he got a permanently divided intelligence establishment

Anyone for
whom democracy is more than just a word should be working to abolish the CIA.
For some ideas on how to do that, send a SASE to Odonian Press at Box 32375, TucsonAZ85751.

Mark Zepezauer

"... what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC
[National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor
acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President."

Philip Agee,
CIA Diary

"... Secret CIA
operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular,
minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention ...
will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote
overt intervention becomes, and the more remote become reforms. Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one
needs."

Philip Agee, CIA Diary

"But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of
the capitalists back in America,
their property and their privileges. US
national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist
class in the US,
not the security of the rest of the people."

Philip Agee, CIA Diary

"A considerable
proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible
prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost
capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of
prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and
underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor.

Increasingly, the
impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed
countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on
their poverty."

Philip Agee, CIA Diary

"American
capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental
motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a
secret police force.

Now, more than ever, each
of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of
minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression,
or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution
of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international
order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to
understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute
day in and day out either to the one side or to the other."

Philip Agee, CIA Diary

CIA

Index of Website

Home Page

NEW
EDITION MARCH 2012

·

Overview

The CIA's Greatest Hits details how the CIA:

* hired top Nazi war criminals, shielded them from justice and learned--and
used--their techniques
* has been involved in assassinations, bombings, massacres, wars, death squads,
drug trafficking, and rigged elections all over the world
* tortures children as young as 13 and adults as old as 89, resulting in forced
"confessions" to all sorts of imaginary crimes (an innocent Kuwaiti
was tortured for months to make him keep repeating his initial lies, and a
supposed al-Qaeda leader was waterboarded 187 times in a single month without
producing a speck of useful information)
* orchestrates the media--which one CIA deputy director liked to call "the
mighty Wurlitzer"--and places its agents inside newspapers, magazines and
book publishers
* and much more.

The CIA's crimes continue unabated, and unpunished. The day before General
David Petraeus took over as the twentieth CIA director, federal prosecutors
announced that they were dropping 99 investigations into the deaths of people
in CIA custody, leaving just two active cases they're willing to pursue.
|||This book is sold in the US
by Sony Electronics Inc. |||This book is sold in Canada by Sony Electronics Inc.

The
Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA?

AP Images
While much of the media focus onl’affairePetraeus has centered on the CIA
director’s sexual relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, the
scandal opens a window onto a different and more consequential
relationship—that between the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations
Command. In a behind-the-scenes turf war that has raged since 9/11, the two
government bodies have fought for control
of the expanding global wars waged by the United States—a turf war that
JSOC has largely won. Petraeus, an
instrumental player in this power struggle, leaves behind an agency that has strayed from intelligence to
paramilitary-type activities. Though his legacy will be defined largely by
the scandal that ended his career, to many within military and intelligence
circles, Petraeus’s career trajectory, from commander of US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to the helm of the CIA,
is a symbol of this evolution.

About
the Author

“I would not say that CIA has been taken over by the military,
but I would say that the CIA has become more militarized,” Philip Giraldi, a
retired career CIA case officer, toldThe Nation. “A considerable part of the
CIA budget is now no longer spying; it’s supporting paramilitaries who work
closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program.” The CIA,
he added, “is a killing machine now.”

As head of US Central Command in 2009, Petraeus issued execute
orders that significantly broadened the ability of US forces to operate in a
variety of countries, including Yemen,
where US
forces began conducting missile strikes later that year. During Petraeus’s
short tenure at the CIA, drone strikes conducted by the agency, sometimes in
conjunction with JSOC, escalated dramatically in Yemen;
in his first month in office, he oversaw a series of strikes that killed three US citizens,
including 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In some cases, such as the raid that
killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan,
commandos from the elite JSOC operated under the auspices of the CIA, so that
the mission could be kept secret if it went wrong.

One current State Department liaison who has also worked
extensively with JSOC describes the CIA
as becoming “a mini-Special Operations Command that purports to be an
intelligence agency.” For all the praise Petraeus won for his
counterinsurgency strategy and the “surge” in Iraq, he says, his real legacy is
as a “political tool,” an enabler of those within the national security
apparatus who want to see a continuation
of covert global mini-wars. Pointing to the “mystique that surrounds JSOC”
and Adm. William McRaven, commander of the Special Operations Command, the
liaison says, “Petraeus was trying to implement that kind of command climate at
the CIA.”

“Petraeus wanted to be McRaven, and now that window has closed,”
he said. “We are firmly in the age of McRaven. There is no other titular figure
with the confidence of the president that is able to articulate strategies and
hold their own in rooms where everyone else has the same or greater amount of
intellectual heft. McRaven is everything that Petraeus is not.”

Retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former senior defense
intelligence official, says that Petraeus’s arrogance—“smoothly concealed
beneath the appearance of the warrior scholar”—made him deeply unpopular among
the military’s high-ranking officers. Dismissing the media’s portrayal of
Petraeus as a “super soldier” and great military leader as “phony bullshit,”
Lang describes him as the product of a military promotion system that
encourages generals to think of themselves as “divinely selected.” “In fact, he
didn’t write the COIN manual, the surge was not the main thing in improving the
situation in Iraq….
They sent him to Afghanistan
to apply the COIN doctrine in the same glorious way he did in Iraq, and it
hasn’t worked. So, if you look beneath the surface from all this stuff, it’s
just a lot of hot air. There are great generals, but this guy is not one of
them.” Arriving at the CIA, Lang says, Petraeus “wanted to drag them in the
covert action direction and to be a major player.”

As for Petraeus’s future, the State Department liaison said,
“There will be a lot of profits to be made by him and his immediate circle of
advisers, as they’re given a soft landing, whether it’s in academia or within
the nexus of the military-industrial complex.”

Giraldi, the former senior CIA officer, expressed concern that
in these circumstances, the “CIA is going to forget how to spy.” He also noted
the “long-term consequence” of the militarization of the CIA: “every
bureaucracy in the world is best at protecting itself. So once the CIA becomes
a paramilitary organization, there’s going to be in-built pressure to keep
going in that direction. Because you’ll have people at the senior levels in the
organization who have come up that way and are protective of what they see as their
turf,” he told me. “That’s the big danger.”

Despite President Obama's opposition to messy, large-scale
military operations, the president is actually a “very careful hawk” when it
comes to military action, Jeremy Scahillargued, in an interviewearly this year with Francis Reynolds.

“A masterful account of an appalling
national drift toward accepting torture as part of our culture and polity.”—Alex Gibney, director, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side

Interview with Author on Democracy Now

Many Americans have condemned the “enhanced
interrogation” techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human
rights. But the United States
has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations.
Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian
Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made
impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government.

During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to
weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while U.S. media was flooded with
seductive images that normalized torture for many Americans. Ten years later,
the U.S. had failed to
punish the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, and continued to
exploit intelligence extracted under torture by surrogates from Somalia to Afghanistan. Although Washington has publicly distanced itself from torture,
disturbing images from the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America’s moral
authority as a world leader.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. His many books
include Policing America’s Empire
and A Question of Torture.

President Obama
and CIA Director David Petraeus: the agency appears engaged in a carefully
planned campaign of leaks about its targeted killing drone campaign.
Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

A story
in last week's New York Times painted a remarkably detailed picture of the
US government's so-called "targeted killing" campaign, a campaign
that involves the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to kill suspected
insurgents and terrorists and, it turns out, many, many others, as well. The
story, written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, discussed the CIA's choice of munitions, its
efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and its method for calculating the number
of civilians killed in any given strike. The story also underscored the extent
to which President Obama himself is involved in overseeing the campaign – and
even in selecting its targets.

The story has already received a
great deal of coverage, but two aspects of it deserve more attention.

The first has to do with the
targeted killing campaign itself. Long before the New York Times story was
published, human rights organizations
questioned the campaign's lawfulness. At
the ACLU, we sued (pdf) over elements of the campaign two years ago,
contending that the US
government's then-proposed (and
now-realized) killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen
would violate both international law and the US constitution.

But the New York Times story
suggests the legal foundation of the targeted killing campaign is not simply
shaky, but rotten. One problem is that the US government appears to take a
very broad view of who can be targeted. At one point, officials at the State
Department complained to the White House that the CIA seemed to believe that
any group of "three guys doing jumping jacks" was a terrorist
training camp.

Another problem, and perhaps an
even deeper one, is in the government's approach towards individuals who are not
targeted – not in the conventional sense of the word, anyway. According to the
New York Times, the government "counts all military-age males in a strike
zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving
them innocent".

If this is true, it is
astounding. The government has an obligation under international law to
distinguish combatants from noncombatants – and, as far as reasonably possible,
to avoid causing noncombatants harm. Direct targeting of noncombatants is a war
crime; indeed, it is the prototypical one. It surely need not be explained that
the government's obligation is to distinguish combatants from noncombatants while
they are still alive, not after they have been killed. A "shoot
first, ask questions later" policy is entirely inconsistent with
international law, not to mention morally grotesque.

The other aspect of the New York
Times story that warrants more attention has to do with the way the story was
assembled. Becker and Shane report that they interviewed "three
dozen" of President Obama's current and former advisors. These advisors
supplied them with granular detail about deliberations inside the White House,
quoted (or paraphrased) conversations between the president and senior
officials, and discussed tensions between various agencies – most notably, the
State Department and the CIA.

That the advisors were so
forthcoming would be remarkable in any circumstances, but it is particularly
remarkable here because the US government's official position – a position it
has set out in legal
briefs and sworn
affidavits (pdf) – is that the CIA's targeted killing campaign is a state
secret. Indeed, the CIA's position in court is that the agency's mere
acknowledgement of the campaign would cause grave and irreparable injury to the
nation's security.

The truth, of course, is that the
CIA has already acknowledged the campaign, and that dozens of government
officials have spoken about it to Jo Becker and Scott Shane and many other
reporters besides. The CIA's litigation position is not intended to protect the
"secrecy" of the agency's killing program, but to protect the
agency's ability to disclose only the information that it wants to disclose –
information that invariably paints the CIA's practices as closely supervised,
supremely effective, and absolutely necessary.

Later this month, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the CIA
will have to file a legal brief explaining to a court in New York why it should be permitted to
eschew real transparency about the targeted killing program, while
simultaneously carrying on its propagandistic campaign of officially sanctioned
leaks. Notably, the Freedom of Information Act was meant to foreclose precisely
this kind of official duplicity. Almost half a century ago, Republican
lawmakers championed the act in the hope of curbing the "selective
disclosures, managed news, half-truths, and admitted distortions" that had
come to characterize official statements about the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. The act, they said, would
"help to blaze a trail of truthfulness and accurate disclosure in what has
become a jungle of falsification, unjustified secrecy, and misstatement by
statistic".

Whether a court will compel the
CIA to retire the increasingly untenable fiction that the targeted killing
program is a secret remains to be seen. There is no doubt, though, that selective
disclosures – and selective
secrecy – about the program has distorted public debate. Last week's New
York Times article serves as a reminder that our public debate about the
government's bureaucratized killing program is based almost entirely on the
government's own selective, self-serving, and unverifiable representations
about it.

This surely puts far too much
power in the hands of the CIA, and too little in the hands of ordinary
citizens.

And as for the rest of you, remember to pick up your copy
of Terminator
Planet, either the ebook by clicking here or the paperback by clicking here,
and ensure that our little publishing venture is a success. News of
drones now seems to be everywhere, even in the comic strips,
so this couldn’t be more timely! To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast
audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses drone warfare and the Obama
administration, click here or download it to your iPod here.Tom]

Praying at the Church of St. DroneThe President and
His Apostles
By Tom
Engelhardt

Be assured of
one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t
just electing a president of the United States; you are also
electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been
emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security structure that
continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self --
are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned
us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant
war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow,
recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a
long New York Times piece
by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s
Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling
amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for
assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President
George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially.
Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three dozen of his
current and former advisers.” In other words, it was essentially an
administration-inspired piece -- columnist Robert Scheer calls it “planted” -- on a “secret” program the president
and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an
election year.

The language of
the piece about our warrior president was generally sympathetic, even in places
soaring. It focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who -- we now know --
has personally approved and overseen the growth of a remarkably robust
assassination program in Yemen,
Somalia, and Pakistan based
on a “kill list.” Moreover, he’s regularly done so target by target, name by
name. (The Times
did not mention a recent U.S.
drone strikein the Philippines that killed 15.) According to
Becker and Shane, President Obama has also been involved in the use of a fraudulent method of counting drone kills, one
that unrealistically deemphasizes civilian deaths.

Historically
speaking, this is all passing strange. The Times calls Obama’s role in the drone killing
machine “without precedent in presidential history.” And that’s accurate.

It’s not,
however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in
any way involved in assassination programs. The state as assassin is
hardly unknown in our history. How could President John F. Kennedy, for
example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against
Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat
(and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully
murdered.) Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the CIA carried
out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation
Phoenix. It proved to be a staggeringly profligate program for
killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply
swept up in the process.

In previous
eras, however, presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or
practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts. We are surely
at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or
his election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and associates to foster a
story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new
position of assassin-in-chief.

Religious Cult or Mafia Hit Squad?

Here’s a
believe-it-or-not footnote to our American age. Who now remembers that,
in the early years of his presidency, George W. Bush kept what the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward called "his own personal scorecard for the war"
on terror? It took the form of photographs with brief biographies and
personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous
terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by Bush once captured or killed. That
scorecard was, Woodward added, always available in a desk drawer in the Oval
Office.

Such private
presidential recordkeeping now seems penny-ante indeed. The distance
we’ve traveled in a decade can be measured by the Times' description of the equivalent of that
“personal scorecard” today (and no desk drawer could hold it):

“It is the
strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of
the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video
teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to
the president who should be the next to die. This secret 'nominations' process
is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets
the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases, and life stories of suspected
members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen
or its allies in Somalia’s
Shabab militia. The nominations go to the White House, where by his own
insistence and guided by [counterterrorism ‘tsar’ John O.] Brennan, Mr. Obama
must approve any name.”

In other words,
thanks to such meetings -- on what insiders have labeled “terror Tuesday” -- assassination has been thoroughly
institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the
president. Without the help of or any oversight from the American people
or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular
killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. He is, in other words, if not a king,
at least the king of American assassinations. On that score, his power is
total and completely unchecked. He can prescribe death for anyone
“nominated,” choosing any of the “baseball cards” (PowerPoint bios) on that kill list and
then order the drones to take them (or others in the neighborhood) out.

He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn’t
enough and that the CIA’s drones can instead strike at suspicious “patterns of behavior” on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan.
He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism
that can stop him. An American global killing machine (quite literally
so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a
single, unaccountable individual. This is the nightmare the founding
fathers tried to protect us from.

In the process,
as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the president has shredded the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing Americans that they will not
“be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced a secretmemo claiming that,while the Fifth Amendment’s
due process guarantee does apply to the drone assassination of an American
citizen in a land with which we are not at war, “it could be satisfied by
internal deliberations in the executive branch.”(That, writes Greenwald, is “the most
extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my
lifetime.”) In other words, the former Constitutional law professor has
been freed from the law of the land in cases in which he “nominates,” as he has, U.S.
citizens for robotic death.

There is,
however, another aspect to the institutionalizing of those “kill lists” and
assassination as presidential prerogatives that has gone unmentioned. If
the Times article --
which largely reflects how the Obama administration cares to see itself and its
actions -- is to be believed, the drone program is also in the process of being
sanctified and sacralized.

You get a sense
of this from the language of the piece itself. (“A parallel, more cloistered selection process at
the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan…”)
The president is presented as a particularly moral man, who devotes himself to
the "just war" writings of religious figures like Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and takes
every death as his own moral burden. His leading counterterrorism advisor
Brennan, a man who, while still in the CIA, was knee-deep in torture controversy, is presented, quite
literally, as a priest of death, not once but twice in the piece. He is
described by the Times
reporters as “a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr.
Obama.” They then quote the State Department’s top lawyer, Harold H. Koh,
saying, “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who
was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

In the Times telling, the organization
of robotic killing had become the administration’s idée fixe, a kind of cult of death within the Oval
Office, with those involved in it being so many religious devotees. We
may be, that is, at the edge of a new state-directed, national-security-based
religion of killing grounded in the fact that we are in a “dangerous” world and
the “safety” of Americans is our preeminent value. In other words, the
president, his apostles, and his campaign acolytes are all, it seems, praying
at the Church of St. Drone.

Of course,
thought about another way, that “terror Tuesday” scene might not be from a
monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia council directly out of a Mario
Puzo novel, with the president as the Godfather, designating “hits” in a
rough-and-tumble world.

How far we’ve
come in just two presidencies! Assassination as a way of life has been
institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being
offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems
and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.

Downhill All the Way on Blowback Planet

After 5,719 inside-the-Beltway
(largely inside-the-Oval-Office) words, the Times
piece finally gets to this single outside-the-Beltway sentence: “Both Pakistan
and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than
when Mr. Obama became president.”

Arguably,
indeed! For the few who made it that far, it was a brief reminder of just
how narrow, how confining the experience of worshiping at St. Drone actually
is. All those endless meetings, all those presidential hours that might
otherwise have been spent raising yet more money for campaign 2012, and the two
countries that have taken the brunt of the drone raids are more hostile, more
dangerous, and in worse shape than in 2009. (And one of them, keep in
mind, is a nuclear power.) News articles since have only emphasized how powerfully those drones have radicalized local populations -- however many “bad guys” (and children) they may also have wiped off the
face of the Earth.

And though the Times doesn’t mention this, it’s
not just bad news for Yemen
or Pakistan.
American democracy, already on the ropes, is worse off, too.

What should
astound Americans -- but seldom seems to be noticed -- is just how into the
shadows, how thoroughly military-centric, and how unproductive has become Washington's thinking at
the altar of St. Drone and its equivalents (including special operations forces, increasingly the president’s
secret military within the military). Yes, the world is always a dangerous place, even if
far less so now than when, in the Cold War era, two superpowers were a
heartbeat away from nuclear war. But -- though it’s increasingly
heretical to say this -- the perils facing Americans, including relatively modest dangers from terrorism, aren’t the worst
things on our planet.

Electing an
assassin-in-chief, no matter who you vote for, is worse. Pretending that
the Church of St. Drone offers any kind of reasonable
or even practical solutions on this planet of ours, is worse yet. And
even worse, once such a process begins, it’s bound to be downhill all the
way. As we learned last week, again in the Times,
we not only have an assassin-in-chief in the Oval Office, but a cyberwarrior,
perfectly willing to release a new form of weaponry, the most sophisticated computer
“worm” ever developed, against another country with which we are not at war.

This represents
a breathtaking kind of rashness, especially from the leader of a country that,
perhaps more than any other, is dependent on computer systems, opening the U.S. to
potentially debilitating kinds of future blowback. Once again, as with
drones, the White House is setting the global rules of the road for every
country (and group) able to get its hands on such weaponry and it’s hit the
highway at 140 miles per hour without a cop in sight.

James Madison,
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the rest of them knew war, and yet
were not acolytes of the eighteenth century equivalents of St. Drone, nor of
presidents who might be left free to choose to turn the world into a killing
zone. They knew at least as well as anyone in our national security state
today that the world is always a dangerous place -- and that that’s no excuse
for investing war powers in a single individual. They didn’t think that a
state of permanent war, a state of permanent killing, or a president free to
plunge Americans into such states was a reasonable way for their new republic
to go. To them, it was by far the more dangerous way to exist in our
world.

The founding
fathers would surely have chosen republican democracy over safety. They
would never have believed that a man surrounded by advisors and lawyers, left
to his own devices, could protect them from what truly mattered. They
tried to guard against it. Now, we have a government and a presidency
dedicated to it, no matter who is elected in November.

UN expert labels CIA tactic exposed by
Bureau 'a war crime'

Jack Serle, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
June 21st, 2012

The UN's expert on extrajudicial killings has
described a tactic used by the CIA and first exposed by a Bureau investigation
as 'a war crime'.

Earlier this year the Bureau and the Sunday Times
revealed the CIA was deliberately targeting rescuers and funeral-goers in its Pakistan drone
strikes. Those controversial tactics have reportedly been revived.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur, told a
meeting in Geneva
on June 21: 'Reference should be made to a study earlier this year by the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism… If civilian 'rescuers' are indeed being
intentionally targeted, there is no doubt about the law: those strikes are a
war crime.'

[...]

In a separate presentation to the Council, Heyns,
said that he was hopeful that the US would reveal the procedures,
rules and legal opinions underlying its controversial use of drones. He also
noted that the US
government did not give his predecessor a satisfactory response when asked to
clarify which aspects of international law it believes covers targeted
killings.

But after a two-day Council debate, Heyns said the US had not been
forthcoming: 'I don't think we have the full answer to the legal framework,' he
said. 'We certainly don't have the answer to the accountability issues.'

A number of other Geneva delegates also expressed concern about
targeted killings. Swiss UNHRC representative Dante Martinelli addressed the
Council and called for transparent reporting of casualties from targeted
killing operations which 'cause many victims among the civilian population.'
Because of the cost to civilians, Switzerland called for 'respect for
the rules of international law.'

Senators terrified with abuse of
Patriot Act's secret laws

Horrified
with the way the US
government uses the Patriot Act against its own people, two senators have been
trying to make these practices public for years. Tired of being ignored,
they're now taking their fight against secret programs to public.

Two US senators wrote the attorney general of the United States
this week, urging the federal government to give the American public evidence
explaining how the Patriot Act has been interpreted since signed into law in
2001.

In a
joint letter to Attorney General Eric Holder sent Thursday, Senators Ron Wyden
(D-Oregon) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado) plead with the government to provide the
American people with the facts behind what the Patriot Act can let America's
top investigators do. The lawmakers, who have rallied for disclosure of these
details for more than two years, say citizens would be "stunned"
to learn what the government believes it can get away with under the law.

The
controversial USA Patriot Act was hastily signed into legislation after the
September 11 al-Qaeda attacks under the guise of a being a necessity for
preventing future terrorist efforts, but for over a decade since the law has
become notorious for its ability to stick federal eyes into seemingly every
aspect of the American public in the name of counter-terrorism. Although the
government has gone on the record to downplay the constitutionally-damning
powers they are granted under the law, Senators Wyden and Udall say it is time
that the feds fulfill the demands of millions of concerned Americans and
discuss in detail what they can do under the act -- and what they've already
done.

Wydell
and Udall are specifically calling on Holder to provide information about how
the government has interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which grants
government officials with certain clearance to obtain "tangible
things" deemed "relevant" to issues of terrorism.
While that much is clear, write the senators, how the government goes about
abiding by it "has been the subject of secret legal
interpretations," which they add "are contained in
classified opinions" that are not made available to much of Congress,
let alone members of the general public.

"We believe most Americans would be
stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have
interpreted Section 215," add the senators . "As we
see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the
law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a
problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what
the law should say when they public doesn't know what its government thinks the
law says."

The
Justice Department has in their own defense said that disclosing details on
certain interpretations could be detrimental to national security, an issue to
which the senators acknowledge. "We believe that is entirely legitimate
for government agencies to keep certain information secret," write
the lawmakers.The argument being made by Wyden and Udall, however, is that the
government is letting itself perceive the law in a way which not only are
Americans completely oblivious to, but Americans are also under the false
impression that matters are marvelously different.

"In a democratic
society -- in which the government derives its powers from the consent of the
people -- citizens rightly expect that their government will not arbitrarily
keep information from them," reads the letter to Holder.
"Americans expect their
government to operate within the boundaries of publically-understood law, and
as voters they have a need and a right to know how the law is being
interpreted, so that they can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf.

"Americans
know that the government will sometimes conduct secret operations, but they
don't think that government officials should be writing secret laws."

Wydell
and Udall add that this is not something that they've only recently been
pressing for. They claim to have gone after the president himself to declassify the interpretations of the
Patriot Act so that Congress can consider discussions on Capitol Hill, but say
that despite repeated attempts to appeal to
Holder and others in the past, no leeway whatsoever has been accomplished.
Now both the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times are trying
to get the truth through filing Freedom of Information Act requests, but the
feds are working overtime to make sure that the attempts at finding the facts
are ignored.

The
senators say they had a glimmer of hope in August 2009 when the Department of
Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that
they would begin a new processes for reviewing and releasing details of
decisions from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court -- the court that interprets the Patriot Act -- but "two
and a half years later, however, this 'process' had produced literally zero
results."

http://rt.com
rt.com is Russian television, which actually does a
great job reporting on US news too.

The
views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the authorah,election timeby liberalsrock
on Sunday, Mar 18, 2012 at 1:00:09 PM

The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest SpyCenterby 911TRUTH on Sunday, Mar 18, 2012 at 1:03:17 PM

How about your own
transparency, Wyden and Udall?by Joan Mootry
on Sunday, Mar 18, 2012 at 4:47:45 PM

Secrets the CIA

Ref Number: 58
Type of Video: Documentary
Genre: Conspiracy
Length: 44 Minutes
Visit Website
Description: Engaging profiles of 5
former CIA agents which includes the varied experiences encountered during
they-re recruitment, frightening top-secret operations, eventual
disillusionment and defection. A remarkable look at the lengths the US
government has gone to manipulate public opinion, radically undermine
civilizations in other countries, and commit crimes against humanity. An
exceptional expose.

Dennis
Kucinich, Statement: “The use of
lethal force by the United States
in countries such as Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia
– countries we are not at war with – constitutes an already troubling
method of waging war in which we are accountable to no one. As Philip Alston,
the United Nations Special Rapporteur recognizes: ‘Not even the American
public, let alone the international community, knows when and where the CIA
has authorized the kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how
the CIA insures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when
civilians are illegally killed. It follows that the international law
requirements of transparency and accountability are comprehensively
violated.’”

A Kidnapping in Milan: THE CIA ON TRIAL

A book so compelling it deserves to become
one of the nonfiction classics of our time.

As
propulsively readable as the best “true crime,”A
Kidnapping in Milanis a potent reckoning with the realities of
counterterrorism. In a mesmerizing page-turner, Steve Hendricks gives us a
ground-level view of the birth and growth of international Islamist terrorist
networks and of counterterrorism in action in Europe.
He also provides an eloquent, eagle’s-eye perspective on the big questions of
justice and the rule of law.

“In Milan a
known fact is always explained by competing stories,” Hendricks writes, but the
stories that swirled around the February 2003 disappearance of the radical imam
Abu Omar would soon point in one direction—to a covert action by the CIA. The
police of Milan
had been exploiting their wiretaps of Abu Omar for useful information before
the taps went silent. The Americans were their allies in counterterrorism—would
they have disrupted a fruitful investigation?

In an extraordinary tale of detective versus spy, Italian investigators under
the leadership of prosecutor Armando Spataro unraveled in embarrassing detail
the “covert” action in which Abu Omar had been kidnapped and sent to be
tortured in Egypt.
Spataro—seasoned in prosecutions of the Mafia and the Red Brigades and a
passionate believer in the rule of law—sought to try the kidnappers in
absentia: the first-ever trial of CIA officers by a U.S. ally. An exemplary achievement
in narrative nonfiction writing,A Kidnapping in Milanis at once a detective story, a
history of the terrorist menace, and an indictment of the belief that man’s
savagery against man can be stilled with more savagery yet.

Prouty, Nada. Uncompromised:
The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of an Arab-American Patriot in the CIA. Palgrave, 2011.This
tale of rampant trampling of citizen’s rights reminds us to be vigilant against
unaccountable government overreach.

CIA TRIES TO CENSOR BOOK

Ali Soufan, The
Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda.

“CIA Seeks to Censor 9/11 Book”

Scott Shane, The New
York Times, August 27, 2011

Intro: "In what amounts to a fight over who gets to
write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central
Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former FBI
agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda."

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair, Counterpunch How
Webb Saved My Ass from the FBI

Gary Webb was the Real Deal

Bill Conroy, Counterpunch I Knew It Was the Truth and That's
What Kept Me Going

My Last Talk with Gary Webb

Richard Thieme, Counterpunch A GiantFalls

Press accounts fail to mention his vindication by CIA
Inspector General reports and congressional investigations

Michael C. Ruppert, From the Wilderness The Pariah

“Two years ago, Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that
said some bad things about the CIA. The CIA denied the charges, and every major
paper in the country took the agency's word for it. Gary was ruined. Which is a shame, because he
was right.”

On this day in 1977, the Central Intelligence Agency
released 20,000 documents revealing that they had engaged in mind-control
experiments. They released the documents after a request under the Freedom of
Information Act, and the revelation triggered a Congressional hearing in August.
The program was named MK-ULTRA; it began in the early 1950s and ran at least
through the late 1960s.

MK-ULTRA had its roots in Operation Paperclip, a program to
recruit former Nazi scientists who had conducted studies on torture and
brainwashing. Operation Paperclip spawned several secret government programs
involving mind control, behavior modification, hypnosis, and the like. It's not
clear whether the CIA's real aim was to produce a "Manchurian
candidate" who could be brainwashed to carry out various tasks, or whether
these off-the-wall "operations" were a smoke screen to keep attention
away from their real mission: to come up with better torture and interrogation
techniques. The program received 6 percent of the CIA's operating budget without
oversight or accounting.

Since then-director Richard Helms ordered all the MK-ULTRA
documents destroyed in 1973, the investigation had to rely on sworn testimony
and the 20,000 remaining documents, which had escaped destruction because they
were stored in a different warehouse. The limited information that was
available at the Congressional hearings revealed that "chemical,
biological, and radiological" methods to achieve mind control were
studied. This involved, among other things, administering drugs like LSD, heroin,
amphetamines, and mescaline to people without their knowledge or consent; they
also used, according to the Congressional report, "aspects of magicians'
art." In one project, called Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up
brothels in San Francisco,
gave patrons LSD, and filmed their responses through hidden cameras. They
figured that even if subjects got suspicious, they would be too embarrassed to
report anything to the authorities. In other experiments conducted at McGillUniversity
in Montreal, subjects
— who had come to the institute thinking they were to be treated for anxiety or
post-partum depression — were put into drug-induced comas and exposed to tape
loops for weeks at a time; others were given electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to
40 times the normal dose. Many subjects suffered lasting damage.

The CIA had the assistance of nearly a hundred colleges and
universities, pharmaceutical companies, research foundations, hospitals, and
prisons in conducting the MK-ULTRA project. Some evidence suggests that
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was one of the subjects; Ken Kesey, author of One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for the LSD tests at a Veterans
Administration hospital when he was a student at Stanford. The official CIA
position is that they no longer conduct mind-control experiments, although at
least one veteran of the agency has said that the tests continue.

A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the
CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments - H. P. Albarelli Jr.; Review'Gripping Cold War tale of the CIA frying
French brains. Tremendous.' -- Fortean Times April 2010. Following nearly a
decade of research, this account solves the mysterious death of biochemist Frank Olson, revealing the
identities of his murderers in shocking detail. It offers a unique and
unprecedented look into the backgrounds of many former CIA, FBI, and Federal
Narcotics Bureau officials—including several who actually oversaw the CIA’s
mind-control programs from the 1950s to the 1970s. In retracing these programs,
a frequently bizarre and always frightening world is introduced, colored, and
dominated by many factors—Cold War fears, the secret relationship between the
nation’s drug enforcement agencies and the CIA, and the government’s close
collaboration with the Mafia.See all Editorial Reviews

The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American
Psychiatrists - Colin A. Ross; The
C.I.A. Doctors, (Manitou Communications, 2006), uncovers the truth about
violations of human rights by American Psychiatrists in the twentieth century.
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and cross-referenced
research published in leading medical journals expose the existence of mind
altering experiments on unwitting human subjects, paid for by the U.S.
government, the U.S. Military and the C.I.A. These experiments which include
LSD experiments, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive treatment, brain
electrode implants, radiation experiments and prostitution rings were perpetrated
not by a few renegade doctors but by leading psychiatrists, psychologists,
neurosurgeons, universities, medical schools and maximum security prisons on
American soil. Dr. Ross takes you on a mind-blowing fact finding adventure into
the secret world of espionage and Manchurian Candidates. Given our situations
in Guantanamo
and Abu Graib the only question left unanswered is what are the U.S.
Government, psychiatrists and medical schools doing today? The C.I.A. Doctors
was originally published as BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation of Multiple
Personality by Psychiatrists in 2000. About the AuthorColin A. Ross, M.D. is an
internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the
field of traumatic stress and trauma related disorders. He is the founder and
President of The Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma. Dr. Ross has
authored over 100 professional papers and books. He has reviewed for numerous
professional journals, and is a member of the American Psychiatric Association
and the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. In addition, Dr.
Ross has served as expert witness in over 50 court cases, consulted on several
television and video productions on trauma related disorders, and produced an
educational video for mental health professionals on the treatment of trauma
based disorders.

The
Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the
World (Second Edition) - L. Fletcher Prouty; The book the CIA doesn't want
you to read—now with a new foreword by Jesse Ventura.The Secret Team, L. Fletcher
Prouty’s exposeì of the CIA’s brutal methods of maintaining national security
during the Cold War, was first published in the 1970s. However, virtually all
copies of the book disappeared upon distribution, having been purchased en
masse by shady “private buyers.” Certainly, Prouty’s allegations—such as how
the U-2 Crisis of 1960 was fixed to sabotage Eisenhower–Khrushchev talk—cannot
have pleased the CIA. The Secret Team appears once more with a new introduction
by Jesse Ventura. About the AuthorL. Fletcher Prouty (1917–2001), a retired
colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special operations for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He was directly in charge
of the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine
activities of the CIA. He was also the author of The Secret Team: The CIA and
Its Allies.

Jesse Ventura is the former
governor of Minnesota
and author of several bestselling books, including Don’t Start the Revolution
Without Me! and American Conspiracies. Ventura
is the host of the television show Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura on
truTV. He lives in Minnesota and Mexico

Shadow Masters: An International Network of
Governments and Secret-Service Agencies Working Together with Drugs Dealers and
Terrorists for Mutual Benefit and Profit
- Daniel Estulin; This investigation examines how behind-the-scenes
collaboration between governments, intelligence services and drug traffickers
has lined the pockets of big business and Western banks. Beginning with a
last-minute request from ex-governor Jesse Ventura, the narrative winds between
the author's own story of covering "deep politics" and the facts he
has uncovered. The ongoing campaign against Victor Bout, the "Merchant of
Death," is revealed as "move/countermove" in a game of
geopolitics, set against the background of a crumbling Soviet Union, a nascent Russia,
bizarre assassinations, wars and smuggling.About the AuthorDaniel Estulin is an
award-winning investigative journalist and author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group. He is the host of two radio
shows in Spain.

The
Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The
Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences - John D. Marks; A comprehensive,
detailed and thoroughly readable account of the CIA safehouses, the
brainwashing experiments, the involvement of the universities. (Washington Monthly )

A serious effort to reconstruct
carefully the details of intelligence agency experiments with 'mind control.'
(American Political Science Review )

One of the most important
books of the year. . . . We see the CIA on the cutting edge of inquiry into
hypnosis, drugs, brainwashing, personality assessment, psychosurgery, electric
and radio stimulations of the brain, the creation of involuntary amnesia,
terminal shock therapy. (Playboy )

Fascinating reading. (Washington Post )

A wonderful piece of
investigative reporting. The best account we'll ever get of one of the seamiest
episodes of American intelligence. (Seymour
Hersh ) Product Description"The CIA exposé to end all CIA exposés."
—New YorkA 'Manchurian Candidate' is an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed
to kill. In this book, former State Department officer John Marks tells the
explosive story of the CIA's highly secret program of experiments in mind
control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide.
Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as
interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that 'accomplished
what two Senate committees could not' (Senator Edward Kennedy). A new consciousness and a totally new
morality are necessary to bring about a radical change in the present culture
and social structure. This is obvious, yet the Left and the Right and the
revolutionary seem to disregard it. Any dogma, any formula, any ideology is
part of the old consciousness; they are the fabrications of thought whose
activity is fragmentation - the Left, the Right, the centre. This activity will
inevitably lead to bloodshed of the Right or of the Left or to totalitarianism.
This is what is going on around us. One sees the necessity of social, economic,
and moral change but the response is from the old consciousness, thought being
the principal actor. The mess, the confusion, and the misery that human beings
have got into are within the area of the old consciousness, and without
changing that profoundly,every human activity-political, economic or
religious-will only bring us to the destruction of each other and of the earth.
-J. Krishnamurti This Light in Oneself

Sue Skidmore to Dick

A Nation Betrayed: The Chilling True Story of Secret
Cold War Experiments Performed on our Children and Other Innocent People by Carol Rutz ...

www.whale.to/b/rutz_h.html - The
Want to Know site lists three books.
Carol Rutz was one of those books listed. The Want to Know site is about Mind Control
and other things….and is a project of several professionals.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/aboutus It
looks very legitimate to me. Carol Rutz
book is out at Amazon and can be ordered as above. Thanks, Sue

A survivor of SRA and
Government Mind Control experimentation is the author of A Nation Betrayed
which tells the true story of secret Cold War experiments performed on
children. With extensive research and testimony from survivors, she documents
experiments by the CIA to create a Manchurian Candidate. Book

A Nation Betrayed: The
Chilling True Story of Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on our Children
and Other Innocent People by Carol Rutz http://my.dmci.net/~casey/ Ritual Abuse - Shadow Government and MountPony
by Carol Rutz [2003]
"Healing from Ritual Abuse and Mind Control." Ritual Abuse Conference

The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror"
have nothing to do with al-Qaeda
and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry
that all but runs U.S.
intelligence operations today.

Surprised? No wonder. In April, Director of National
Intelligence Mike
McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by
U.S.
intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed -- and suddenly
classified a national secret. What McConnell
doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where
no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA
and is running the show.

Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there
has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing.
Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune,
I'm told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me
that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) -- the
heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsourced to private firms such
as Abraxas, Booz
Allen Hamilton, Lockheed
Martin and Raytheon.

These firms recruit spies, create non-official cover
identities and control the movements of CIA case officers. They also provide
case officers and watch officers at crisis centers and regional desk officers
who control clandestine operations worldwide. As the Los
Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in
two key CIA stations in the fight against terrorism -- Baghdad
and Islamabad,
Pakistan
-- is made up of industrial contractors, or "green badgers," in CIA
parlance.

Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS
have been outsourced to private industry. These branches are still managed by U.S.
government employees ("blue badgers") who are accountable to the
agency's chain of command. But beneath them, insiders say, is a supervisory
structure that's controlled entirely by contractors; in some cases, green
badgers are managing green badgers from other corporations.

Sensing problems -- and possibly fearing congressional
action -- the CIA recently conducted a hasty review of all of its job
classifications to determine which perform "essential government
functions" that should not be outsourced. But it's highly doubtful that
such a short-term exercise can comprehensively identify the proper
"blue/green" mix, especially because contractors' work statements
have long been carefully formulated to blur the distinction between approvable
and debatable functions.

Although the contracting system is Byzantine, there's no
question that the private sector delivers high-quality professional
intelligence services. Outsourcing has provided solutions to
personnel-management problems that have always plagued the CIA's operations
side. Rather than tying agents up in the kind of office politics that
government employees have to engage in to advance their careers, outsourcing
permits them to focus on what they do best, which boosts morale and performance.
Privatization also immediately increased the number of trained, experienced
agents in the field after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Even though wide-scale outsourcing may not immediately
endanger national security, it's worrisome. The contractors in charge of
espionage are still chiefly CIA alumni who have absorbed its public service
values. But as the center of gravity shifts from the public sector to the
private, more than one independent intelligence firm has developed plans to
"raise" succeeding generations of officers within its own training
systems. These corporate-grown agents will be inculcated with corporate values
and ethics, not those of public service.

And the current piecemeal system has introduced some
vulnerabilities. Historically, the system offered members of the intelligence
community the kind of stability that ensured that they would keep its secrets.
That dynamic is now being eroded. Contracts come and go. So do workforces. The
spies of the past came of age professionally in a strong extended family, but
the spies of the future will be more like children raised in multiple foster
homes -- at risk.

Today, when Booz Allen Hamilton loses a contract to SAIC,
people rush from one to the other in a game of musical chairs, with not enough
chairs for all the workers who possess both the highest security clearances and
expertise in the art of espionage. Some inevitably lose out. Any good
counterintelligence officer knows what can happen next. Down-on-their-luck
spies begin to do what spies do best: spy. Other companies offer them jobs in
exchange for industry secrets. Foreign governments approach them. And some day,
terrorists will clue in to this potential workforce.

The director of national intelligence has put our security
at risk by classifying the study on outsourcing and keeping the truth about
this inadequately planned and managed system out of the light. Much of what has
been outsourced makes sense, but much of the structure doesn't, not for the
longer term. It's time for the public and Congress to demand the study's
release. More important, it's past time for the industry -- an industry
conceived of and run by some of the best and brightest the CIA has ever
produced -- to come up with the kind of innovative solutions it's legendary
for, before the damage goes too deep.

WashingtonD.C., June 21, 2007- The Central Intelligence
Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal
wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human
experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s,
according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National
Security Archive at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity.

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the
Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal
activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the
so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages
of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of
Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents.
Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very
different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on
Monday, June 25.

"This is the first voluntary CIA declassification of
controversial material since George
Tenet in 1998 reneged on the 1990s promises of greater openness at the
Agency," commented Thomas Blanton, the Archive's director.

Hayden also announced the declassification of some 11,000
pages of the so-called CAESAR, POLO and ESAU papers--hard-target analyses of
Soviet and Chinese leadership internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations
from 1953-1973, a collection of intelligence on Warsaw Pact military
programs, and hundreds of pages on the A-12 spy plane.

The National Security Archive separately obtained (and
posted today) a six-page summary of the illegal CIA
activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in
December 1974, and the memorandum
of conversation when the CIA first briefed President
Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975.

Then-CIA director Schlesinger commissioned the
"family jewels" compilation with a May 9, 1973 directive after
finding out that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and James McCord (both
veteran CIA officers) had cooperation from the Agency as they carried out
"dirty tricks" for President Nixon. The Schlesinger directive,
drafted by deputy director for operations William Colby, commanded senior CIA
officials to report immediately on any current or past Agency matters that
might fall outside CIA authority. By the end of May, Colby had been named to
succeed Schlesinger as DCI, and his loose-leaf notebook of memos totaled 693
pages [see John
Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret
Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Oxford University Press,
2003, pp. 259-260.]

Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA's illegal domestic
operations with a front page story in the New
York Times on December 22, 1974 ("Huge C.I.A. Operation
Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon
Years"), writing that "a check of the CIA's domestic files ordered
last year… produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities… beginning
in the nineteen fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the
surreptitious inspection of mail."

On December 31, 1974, CIA director Colby and the CIA
general counsel John Warner met with the deputy attorney general,
Laurence Silberman, and his associate, James Wilderotter, to brief Justice
"in connection with the recent New
York Times articles" on CIA matters that "presented
legal questions." Colby's list included 18 specifics:

1. Confinement of a Russian defector that "might be
regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws."
2. Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott.
3. Physical surveillance of muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates,
including current Fox News anchor Brit Hume.
4. Physical surveillance of then Washington Post reporter Michael Getler.
5. Break-in at the home of a former CIA employee.
6. Break-in at the office of a former defector.
7. Warrantless entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee.
8. Mail opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union.
9. Mail opening from 1969 to 1972 of letters to and from China.
10. Behavior modification experiments on "unwitting" U.S.
citizens.
11. Assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo (on the latter, "no active
part" but a "faint connection" to the killers).
12. Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971.
13. Surveillance of a particular Latin American female and U.S. citizens in Detroit.
14. Surveillance of a CIA critic and former officer, Victor Marchetti.
15. Amassing of files on 9,900-plus Americans related to the antiwar
movement.
16. Polygraph experiments with the San
Mateo, California,
sheriff.
17. Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws.
18. Testing of electronic equipment on US telephone circuits.

Read the DocumentsNote: The
following documents are in PDF format.
You will need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat
Reader to view.

On New Years' eve, 1974, DCI Colby met with Justice
Department officials, including Deputy Attorney General Laurence H.
Silberman, to give them a full briefing of the "skeletons."

Document
2: Colby Briefs President Ford on the Family JewelsMemorandum of
Conversation, 3 January 1975Source: Gerald R.
Ford President Library

Ten days after the appearance of Hersh's New York Times story, DCI
William Colby tells President Ford how his predecessor James Schlesinger
(then serving as Secretary of Defense) ordered CIA staffers to compile the
"skeletons" in the Agency's closet, such as surveillance of student
radicals, illegal wiretaps, assassination plots, and the three year
confinement of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko.

An apoplectic Kissinger argues that the unspilling of CIA
secrets is "worse than the days of McCarthyism" when the Wisconsin
Senator went after the State Department. Kissinger had met with former DCI
Richard Helms who told him that "these stories are just the tip of the
iceberg," citing as one example Robert F. Kennedy's role in
assassination planning. Ford wondered whether to fire Colby, but Kissinger
advised him to wait until after the investigations were complete when he
could "put in someone of towering integrity." The "Blue
Ribbon" announcement refers to the creation of a commission chaired by
then-vice president Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Cabinet and sub-cabinet level officials led by Kissinger
discuss ways and means to protect information sought by ongoing Senate
(Church Committee) and House (Pike Committee) investigations of intelligence
community abuses during the first decades of the Cold War. Worried about the
foreign governments that have cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies,
Kissinger wants to "demonstrate to foreign countries that we aren't too
dangerous to cooperate with because of leaks."

CIA
AND DRUGS

January 25, 2008

A CounterPunch Special Investigation

How the CIA Inflitrated the DEA: Operation Two-Fold

By DOUGLAS VALENTINEThe DEA and its predecessor federal drug law
enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees,
managed by America's
intelligence agencies. The reason is simple enough: the US Government has been
protecting its drug smuggling allies, especially in organized crime, since
trafficking was first criminalized in 1914. Since then drug law enforcement has
been a function of national security in its broadest sense; not just protecting
our aristocracy from foreign enemies, but preserving the Establishment's
racial, religious and class prerogatives.

The glitch in the system is that while investigating traffickers,
federal drug agents are always unearthing the Establishment's ties to organized
crime and its proxy drug syndicates. US intelligence and security
agencies recognized this problem early in the early 1920s and to protect their
Establishment patrons (and foreign and domestic drug smuggling allies fighting
communists), they dealt with the problem by suborning well-placed drug law enforcement
managers and agents.

They have other means at their disposal as well. In 1998, for example,
in a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, reporter Gary Webb
claimed that the CIA had facilitated the flow of crack cocaine to street gangs
in Los Angeles.
After the Agency vehemently denied the allegations, Webb was denounced by the
CIA's co-conspirators: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,
and the Washington Post. Frightened into submission by the growls of its
biggers and betters, the Mercury News retracted Webb's story and sent
the reporter into internal exile. The CIA's Inspector General later admitted
that Webb was partially right. But being unjustly discredited is the price one
pays for tearing the mask off the world's biggest drug trafficker.

It's always been that way. Case in point: in 1960 MacMillan published
Russ Koen's book The China
Lobby. In it Koen said the Nationalist Chinese were smuggling narcotics
into the US, "with the
full knowledge and connivance" of their government in Taiwan. He said that
"prominent Americans have participated and profited from these
transactions." The idea of prominent Americans profiting from drug
trafficking was unthinkable and quick as a flash, Harry J. Anslinger, the
Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), denounced Koen as a
fraud. Within weeks Koen's book was remaindered into obscurity by MacMillan.

Professor Al McCoy's seminal book The Politics of Heroin, published in 1972, is another
example. The CIA knew about McCoy's research and approached his publisher,
demanding thatit suppress the book on grounds of national security.
Harper Row refused, but agreed to allow the CIA to review the book prior to
publication. When McCoy objected, Harper Row said it would not publish the book
unless McCoy submitted.

Examples of federal drug law enforcement's complicity with the CIA also
abound and many are recounted in my first book on the subject, The
Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics 1930-1968. In my
new book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Espionage Intrigues, and
Personalities that Defined the DEA, I explain how the CIA infiltrated the
DEA and how, under CIA direction, the war on drugs became a template for the
war on terror. One example shall be presented in this essay.

The Merry Pranksters

My new book, Strength of thePack, begins in April 1968,
when, in the wake of a huge corruption scandal, the Johnson Administration
folded the FBN into a new organization called the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced the appointment
of thirty-eight year old John E. Ingersoll as the BNDD's director. In a letter
to me Clark said that Ingersoll "offered a clean break with a past that
had ended in corruption and, I hoped, a new progressive, scientific based
approach to drug control in a time of deep social unrest."

Clark appointed Ingersoll while Johnson was president and after the
elections, in an attempt to preempt the in-coming Nixon Administration, Clark held a news conference to proclaim the Johnson
Administration's success in cleansing the BNDD of any lingering corruption.
"32 Narcotics Agents Resign in Corruption Investigation Here," read
the headline in the 14 December 1968 New York Times. Clark
noted that five of the bad agents had been indicted, and that additional
prosecutions and resignations would soon be forthcoming.The Democrats had lost the election, largely because the "law and
order" candidate Richard Nixon had promised to win the war on drugs.
Ironically, once he was elected president, this vow would pit Nixon against the
CIA, which was aiding and abetting the major politicians and generals
commanding America's allies
in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, many of whom were part of
a huge Kuomintang drug smuggling network. In order to defeat the Communists,
their drug smuggling activities had to be protected. But in order for Nixon to
make good on his promise to win the war on drugs, they had to be stopped. Thus
began the CIA's infiltration of the BNDD, and its struggle with Nixon's
anti-Establishment, felonious minions for control over targeting of major
traffickers as a mean of managing the war on drugs.BNDD Director John Ingersoll was totally unprepared for the political
tug-of-war he found himself in the midst of. He had joined the Oakland police department
in 1956, serving as a motorcycle cop and later as an administrative assistant
to the chief. In the mid-1960s he became the police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina
where he earned a reputation as a straight arrow and fighter against
corruption. But within a year of taking control of the BNDD, Ingersoll realized
he was no match for the wily federal drug agents he inherited. They were a
cunning and dangerous wolf pack, and the organization's top officials were
among the worst offenders.

As one agent explains, "Most were corrupted by the lure of the
underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door--go out
and lie, cheat, and steal--then come back and retrieve it. But you can't. In
fact, if you're successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things
become tools you use in the bureaucracy. You're talking about guys whose lives
depended on their ability to be devious and who become very good at it. So
these people became the bosses. Meanwhile the agents were losing their
simplicity in subtle ways."

Ingersoll knew this, but he was also aware of the high priority Nixon
placed on winning the war on drugs. Rather than generate a scandal, Ingersoll
decided to go outside of the organization, to the CIA, for help in quietly
rooting out corruption. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission Report On CIA
Activities Within The United States stated that the joint CIA-BNDD
anti-corruption program began when Ingersoll became "vitally"
concerned that some of his employees might have been corrupted by drug
traffickers. Lacking the necessary security apparatus to expunge these corrupt
agents, Ingersoll in early 1970 asked the Director of Central Intelligence,
Richard Helms, for help building a "counter-intelligence" capacity.
The request was "apparently" supported by President Nixon's Attorney
General, John Mitchell.

The man Ingersoll appointed chief inspector of BNDD, Patrick Fuller,
had served with IRS investigations for nearly 20 years in California. Fuller was Ingersoll's close
friend, but apart from that, he was incapable of mounting internal security
investigations against federal drug agents. When Ingersoll proposed that they
turn to the CIA, Fuller readily agreed. The plan, known as Operation Twofold,
involved the hiring of CIA officers to spy on ranking BNDD officials suspected
of corrupt practices, past and present. As Pat Fuller recalls, "We
recruited the CIA officers for BNDD through a proprietary company. A
corporation engaged in law enforcement hired research consultants, and three
CIA officers posing as private businessmen were hired to do the contact and
interview work."

The principle recruiter was Jerry Soul, assisted by CIA officers John F
Murnane, Joseph Cruciani, and Chick Barquin. Then a personnel officer at CIA
headquarters, Soul had managed Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs invasion,
and later directed the CIA's exile Cuban mercenary army and air force in the Congo.

Apart from one exile Cuban, the CIA officers hired for Operation
Twofold were, typically, Anglo paramilitary officers whose careers had stalled
due to the gradual reduction of CIA forces in Vietnam
and Laos.
Those hired were put through the BNDD training course and assigned by Fuller to
spy on a particular regional director and his trusted subordinates. According
to Fuller, no records were kept and some participants will never be identified
because they were "cut-outs" who never went to a BNDD office, but spied
from afar and reported clandestinely. Some were not even known to Fuller. All
were supposed to be sent overseas but most remained in the US.Much of Twofold remains a mystery because, as the Rockefeller
Commission reported, it "violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA's
participation in law enforcement activities."

No one was ever prosecuted.

Twofold Case Studies

Twofold was aimed at the BNDD's top managers. One target was Joseph J.
Baca, the assistant Regional Director in Los
Angeles. The cousin of a top Mexican cop, Baca in July
1969 was charged by the New Mexico State Police with trafficking in drugs and
stolen property. He was accused of arranging burglaries and holdups, and
allegedly sold heroin to a drug smuggler. But the local investigations were closed
without any adverse action against Baca, so Twofold torpedo Charles
"Chuck" Gutensohn was asked to investigate.

Gutensohn had served with the Special Forces in South Vietnam. He left the army in
1964, earned a college degree, and in 1968 joined the CIA. For the next two
years, Gutensohn served in Pakse, Laos,
one of the major drug transit points between the Golden Triangle and Saigon. He had drug experience and upon returning to the US, Gutensohn was given the choice of being the
CIA's liaison to the BNDD in Laos,
or joining Twofold. Gutensohn's brother Joel, also a Vietnam
veteran, had joined the Twofold program six months earlier in Chicago. That being the case, Chuck joined
too.

"After meeting with Jerry Soul," Gutensohn recalls, "I
met Fuller at a hotel near Tyson's Corner. He said that when we communicated, I
was to be known as Leo Adams, for Los
Angeles. He was to be Walter De Carlo, for Washington, DC."

Fuller recruited Gutensohn and the other CIA officers because they did
not have to be trained in the "tradecraft skills" required for the
job of spying on their bosses. But Gutensohn's cover was blown before he got to
LA. As he recalls, "Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew.
About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, "I hear that
Pat Fuller signed your credentials."A similar situation occurred in Miami,
where Fuller's targets were Regional Director Ben Theisen and Group Supervisor
Pete Scrocca. Terry Burke, who would cap his career as the DEA's acting administrator
in 1990, was one of the Twofold agents assigned to investigate Theisen and
Scrocca. Tall and handsome, Burke's background is fascinating. After serving as
a Marine guard at the US Embassy in Rome, he joined the CIA and served as a
paramilitary officer in Laos from 1963-1965, working for legendary CIA officer
Tony Poshepny at the 118A base near Ban Houei Sai--the epicenter of the Golden
Triangle's opium and heroin trade. Burke received the CIA's highest award, the
Intelligence Star, for gallantry in combat in Laos. He served his next tour in
the Philippines
but in 1969 was assigned to a dead-end job at CIA headquarters. Knowing his
career had stalled, Burke contacted a friend from Italy, Customs Agent Fred Cornetta.
Then the agent in charge at Dulles airport, Cornetta persuaded Burke to join
the BNDD.

Burke applied and was hired in December 1970. Fuller recruited him into
the Twofold operation and assigned him to Pete Scrocca's group. But instead of
spying on his new colleagues, Burke set about proving that he was tough and
smart enough to work "undercover cases on bad guys with shotguns in motel
rooms." Burke never sent any negative reports to Fuller, and Theisen and
Scrocca eventually accepted him.

Gutensohn and Burke's experience was not unusual, and Twofold never
resulted in a single dismissal of any corrupt BNDD agent. The astonishing
reason for this is quite simple. Little did Ingersoll or Fuller know that the
CIA never initiates a program unless it is deniable and has "intelligence
potential." Twofold conformed to these criteria: it was deniable because
it was, ostensibly, a BNDD program; and it had intelligence potential in so far
as it was perfectly suited for Angletonian style "operations within
operations."

As the BNDD's chief inspector Pat Fuller told me, "There was
another operation even I didn't know about. Why don't you find out who set that
one up, and why?"

Boxes Within Boxes

Well, I did find out about this operation. Quite by accident, while
interviewing a DEA agent in Miami,
I was introduced to Joseph C DiGennaro, a member of the CIA's secret facet of
Operation Twofold, its unilateral drug operations unit. Hidden behind Fuller's
"inspections" program, the purpose of the CIA's unilateral drug unit
was to identify drug-dealers worldwide, and selectively kidnap and/or
assassinate them. As DiGennaro explains, his entry into the program began when
an eminent surgeon, a family friend, suggested that he apply for a job with the
BNDD. Then working as a stockbroker in New
York City, DiGennaro in August 1971 met Fuller at a
Howard Johnson's near the Watergate complex. Fuller told him that if he took
the Twofold job, he would be given the code name Novo Yardley. The code name
was based on DiGennaro's posting in New
York, and a play on the name of the famous American
spy, Herbert Yardley.DiGennaro took the job and was sent to a CIA security officer to obtain
the required clearances. That's when he was told that he and several other
recruits were being "spun-off" from Fuller's inspection program into
the CIA's unilateral "operational" program. He was told that he had
been selected because he had a black belt in Karate and the uncanny ability to
remember lists and faces. The background check took 14 months, during which
time DiGennaro received intensive combat and tradecraft training. In October
1972 he was sent to BNDD regional headquarters in New York and, as a cover, was assigned to a
compliance group that mostly inspected pharmacies. His paychecks came from
official BNDD funds, though the program was funded by the CIA through the
Department of Interior's Bureau of Mines. The program had been authorized by
the "appropriate" Congressional committee.

DiGennaro's special group was managed by the CIA's Special Operations
Division (then under Evan Parker, first director of the CIA's Phoenix Program)
in conjunction with the military, which provided assets within foreign military
services to keep ex-filtration routes open. Ex-filtration routes were air
corridors and roads. The military also cleared air space when captured suspects
were brought into the US.
DiGennaro spent most of his time on operations in South America, but served in Lebanon
and other places too.

Within the CIA's special anti-drug unit, which numbered about 40 men,
were experts in printing, forgery, maritime operations, and telecommunications.
The operatives knew one another by first name only. DiGennaro, however, was
aware that other BNDD agents, including Joseph Salm and Paul Seema, were in the
program. No one else in the BNDD, however, knew about the program. When the
call to duty came, DiGennaro would check with Fuller and then take sick time or
annual leave to go on missions. There were lots of missions. As his group
leader in New York,
Joe Quarequio, told me: "Joey was never in the office."

The job was tracking down, kidnapping, and if they resisted, killing
drug dealers. The violence was the result of the "limited window of
opportunity" needed to get the job done. Due to the need for plausible
deniability, there was minimal contact with the American Embassy where the
mission was conducted. DiGennaro had "a Guardian Angel" who
"assembled intelligence, developed routines, and contacted
informants." But the host country and its uniformed police and military services
were rarely aware of his presence, and there was little coordination with the
local BNDD outpost.

The operations were extremely dangerous. As DiGennaro recalls,
"There was a case in Colombia.
There was seventy-two to ninety-six hours to get it done. I was flown to Colombia
where I contacted my Guardian Angel. He had paid someone off and that someone
had led him to a cocaine lab. The operators of the lab had been surveilled and
followed to their hideout. In order to capture them, we had to work with a
local military unit, which we contacted by two-way radio. In this particular
instance, someone intercepted the call, and the next thing we know there's a
woman on the radio alerting the suspects. She was an agent of the traffickers
inside the local military unit. We hear her screaming at the soldiers. Then
she's shot. We didn't know who she was calling," he continues, "so we
had to leapfrog by helicopter and military truck to where we thought the
subjects were. That time we happened to be right. We got the violators back to the
United States.
They were incapacitated by drugs and handcuffed in various men's' rooms in
Chicago and Miami."

As one DEA Agent recalls, "We'd get a call that there was 'a
present' waiting for us on the corner of 116th St and Sixth Avenue. We'd go there
and find some guy who'd been indicted in the Eastern District of New York,
handcuffed to a telephone pole. We'd take him to a safe house for questioning
and, if possible, turn him into an informer. Sometimes we'd have him in custody
for months. But what did he know?" If you're a Colombian or a Corsican
drug dealer in Argentina
and a few guys with police credentials arrest you, how do you know it's a CIA
operation?

Expendable operative DiGennaro did not see the management apparatus
that was directing him. He never knew much about the people the CIA unit was
snatching and snuffing either; only that people were prosecuted and that
defendants screamed.

DiGennaro's last operation in 1977 involved the recovery of a satellite
that had fallen into a drug dealer's hands. By then he had all the CIA
tradecraft skills required to fly solo; he learned who owned satellite,
negotiated for it in good faith, and purchased it back on the black market.
Such was the extent of the "parallel mechanism" the CIA had with the BNDD;
a mechanism the CIA obviously used not only for anti-drug purposes, but for
counter-terror reasons as well.

Fallout

By 1977, some 125 "former" CIA officers had been infiltrated
into the DEA at every level of the organization, especially in intelligence
units, making everything possible--from black market arms exchanges, to
negotiations with terrorists, to political assassination. It also put the CIA
in total control of targeting.

However, as the CIA's influence became pervasive, more and more DEA
agents felt its adverse impact on their cases. First the CIA demanded a list of
all overseas DEA informants, as well as copies of all its intelligence reports.
They got both. Next they began recruiting traffickers the DEA was working on.
These recruits were subtracted from the DEA target list. In Chile in 1973, for example, the CIA allowed five
drug traffickers to leave the soccer stadium in Santiago where dissidents were being tortured
en masse. These traffickers fled to Colombia
where they helped form the cartel that would eventually supplied crack cocaine
to street gangs in Los Angles, through other CIA assets in Latin
America.

As one DEA agent puts it, "The relationship between the CIA and
DEA was not as it was originally intended. The CIA does not belong in any type
of law enforcement activity, unless it can result in a conviction. Which it
rarely does. They should only be supportive, totally."In February 1977, as he was about to resign in dismay, this agent and a
group of other senior DEA officials felt compelled to document a litany of CIA
misdeeds.

The CIA was causing so many problems that in early 1977, outgoing
Assistant Administrator for Enforcement Dan Casey sent a three page,
single-spaced memorandum to DEA Administrator Peter Bensinger expressing his
concern "over the role presently being played by the CIA relative to the
gathering of operational intelligence abroad." Signing off on the memo
were six enforcement division chiefs. "All were unanimous in their belief
that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA,
both foreign and domestic." Unilateral CIA programs in foreign countries
were a "potential source of conflict and embarrassment and which may have
a negative impact on the overall U.S. narcotic reduction
effort." He referenced specific incidents, citing CIA electronic
surveillance and the fact that the CIA "will not respond positively to any
discovery motion." Casey foresaw more busted cases and complained that
"Many of the subjects who appear in these CIA promoted or controlled
surveillances regularly travel to the United States in furtherance of
their trafficking activities." The "de facto immunity" from
prosecution enables the CIA assets to "operate much more openly and
effectively."Casey was especially upset that the CIA demanded that DEA provide
telephone numbers for its operations. "This practice is most disturbing
because, in effect, it puts DEA in the position of determining which violators
will be granted a de facto immunity." Considering the seriousness of the
problem, he recommended that "all DEA support for CIA electronic
surveillance be suspended at once." He asked DDEA Administrator Peter
Bensinger to insist that the CIA adhere to guidelines set by the Carte White
House Domestic Council, which limited the CIA to gathering strategic
intelligence. He advised that DEA personnel not request CIA support "which
might end to prejudice the domestic prosecution of any drug trafficker."

Alas, Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of the DEA's integrity.
He ignored Casey and his division chiefs. The Strength of the Pack
features examples of how this accommodation with the CIA emasculated the DEA.
One major example is the CIA's Contra Connection, as revealed by Gary Webb.
There is also the fact that Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset and that his DEA
file was destroyed by CIA infiltrators, paving the way for the invasion of Panama.
There was also the Pan Am 103 case in December 1988, in which a bomb was
planted by enemy agents who had penetrated a protected CIA drug ring, which was
making a "controlled delivery."This huge crack in the CIA's protective shield led to the formation of
the CIA's Counter-NarcoticsCenter, and business
continued as usual. In December 1989, as reported in the 4 May 1990 issue of Newsday,
"a small US special operations team both planned and carried" out a
raid that resulted in the death of drug lord Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, his
17 year old son, and several bodyguards. Pablo Escobar in 1994 was similarly
assassinated by a CIA led execution squad.

The Gacha and Escobar hits, and many more like them which the public
knows little or nothing about, are extrapolations of those performed by Joey
DiGennaro. And the beat goes on. Shortly after he resigned in 1993, DEA chief
Robert Bonner revealed that the CIA in 1990 had shipped a ton of pure cocaine
to Miami from its CounterNarcoticCenter
warehouse in Venezuela.
The Orwellian "controlled delivery" was accidentally lost.

With Bush's war on terror, the situation has only gotten worse. In Afghanistan
and South West Asia, the DEA is entirely infiltrated and controlled by the CIA
and military. DEA headquarters is basically an adjunct of the Oval Office. And
the Establishment continues to keep the lid on the story. After sending my manuscript
to two reviewers--one with CIA connections, the other with DEA connections--my
publisher has stopped communicating with me. I think my editor just wants me to
go away.

One can only wonder how deeply America will descend into this
vortex of fear and subservience to state security before it vanishes
altogether.

In 1991 our RSO, the Arkansas Committee, invited
Professor Al McCoy to visit us here and speak at GiffilLs in Old Main. He
spoke on the CIA controlled drug trade at the Mena, Arkansas airport. We filmed that event
and it is available upon your request in DVD format. Dr. McCoy's book is
available at:

In 1994, the fiction writer Charles Baxter
published “Dysfunctional Narratives,” an essay in which he claims to have
uncovered “the greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty
years.” His argument is an unorthodox one: Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Beckett,
Kafka, Hemingway and Faulkner aren’t mentioned at all, and the person in
question, it turns out, isn’t even a novelist, though he did write books (ones
full of sentences that are “leaden and dulling, juridical-minded to the last,
impersonal but not without savor,” and that “present the reader with camouflage
masked as objective thought”). This person’s influence on America fiction,
however, is traceable neither to his books nor their prose style, but rather to
his apparent addiction to deniability—that noxious brew of disavowal,
compartmentalization, structured ignorance and deception-as-policy through
which negative outcomes become all but impossible to blame on anyone in
particular. The person Baxter has in mind is none other than Richard Nixon, who
brought the rhetoric of deniability to the public stage as no one had before,
and who made its quintessential phrase—“mistakes were made”—a staple of
American discourse about decisions and their consequences.

The Covert SphereSecrecy, Fiction, and the NationalSecurityState.
By Timothy Melley.Buy this book

Baxter goes on to argue that widespread
narratives of disavowal “humiliate the act of storytelling”: “You can’t
reconstruct a story—you can’t even know what the story is—if everyone is
saying, ‘Mistakes were made.’ Who made them? Well, everybody made them and no
one did, and it’s history anyway, so we should forget about it.” Without
motives, agency or resolution, our national story becomes “dysfunctional.” So
too stories about the self, which attempt to address unhappiness but are
ill-equipped to do so, at least when unhappiness results from the actions of
governments, corporations or banks, all of which have become deniability experts.
Authors create characters who are unhappy, confused or trapped—and looking for
answers why. But because the misdeeds of banks, for example, are fiendishly
hard to understand (often by design) and not easily shoehorned into the
conventions of realist storytelling, novels are more likely to point the finger
at something close by and easily named. Family life works well as a cause of
unhappiness, and so does childhood trauma (even better if its memory has been
repressed and the narrative can trace its recovery). “That’s the whole story,”
Baxter writes glumly. “When blame has been assigned, the story is over.”

By his own description, Baxter is an author
committed to fiction where characters take actions and live with their effects.
“Mistakes and crimes tend to create narratives, however, and they have done so
from the time of the Greek tragedies,” he notes. Consequently, the “culture of
disavowals”—which Baxter sees everywhere, from talk shows to graduate fiction
workshops to the acclaimed novels of the day—strikes him as a defeat: the
domestication, in the most pejorative sense of the word, of life and literature
by the powers that be.

Timothy Melley, a professor at Miami
University, is also interested in how American fiction has been influenced by
institutionalized deception from on high, â€¨particularly with regard to the
covert sectors of government that came into being during and after World War
II. But his account—which he eventually frames in explicit opposition to
Baxter’s—locates the origins of deniability much earlier than Nixon. If
deniability has an author, Melley argues inThe
Covert Sphere, it is George Kennan, who in 1948 penned National
Security Council directive NSC-10/2, the document that changed the CIA, then
barely one year old, from a purely intelligence-gathering outfit into an agency
charged with “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including
sabotage, anti-sabotage” and so on. Crucially, NSC-10/2 ordered that these
operations be implemented in such a way that, if discovered, “the US Government
can plausibly disclaim any responsibility.”

More than sixty years later, the American
covert sector is a thriving, many-tentacled monster of deniability funded by at
least $75 billion per year, consisting of at least forty-five government
agencies, 1,271 smaller government organizations and 1,391 private
corporations. Thanks to the occasional revelation by investigative journalists
or congressional committees, most Americans have a vague idea that the covert
sector exists, that it has a great deal of power, and that it has in the past
resorted to surveillance, kidnapping, torture and assassination in the name of
protecting American interests. But what people know best about the covert
sector is that it remains mostly unknowable by design: it lies, it keeps its
past and future plans secret, it spreads misinformation both abroad and at
home, and it shrouds its every move in a thick haze of overlapping cover
stories and disavowals. It is the massive “known unknown” of American life, the
supreme dysfunctional narrative, doing its business somewhere out of sight
while we eat breakfast, or sleep, or read about it in the news without learning
what it is. “Mistakes were made” implies a corollary, unspoken but I think
widely felt: more mistakes are being made right now, and will remain unknown
until long after the damage is done.

This is the sort of impotent half-knowledge
that Baxter bemoans in “Dysfunctional Narratives.” Melley agrees that repeated
exposure to lying-as-policy has been bad for everyone. Citizens have been
pushed into a state of “radical unknowing,” or knowing for certain only that
they really don’t know. But unlike Baxter, Melley thinks America’s writers, or
at least a few of them, have risen admirably to the challenge—not by
constructing narratives that Baxter would ever call functional, but by playing
dysfunction for all it’s worth, the better to pinpoint its effect on the
national and individual consciousness.

This is a familiar argument: radical new times
have rendered obsolete familiar literary modes and pleasures. Paeans to an art
that revels in its own instability, uncertainty or inconclusiveness—its
intentional, self-aware dysfunctionality—are as old as literature itself, as
are conservative laments such as Baxter’s. But Melley isn’t interested (or at
least not exclusively so) in cheerleading for the postmodern. What makes his
argument fascinating is his attention to the actual history of America’s
relationship to the institutions that house its official open secrets, and to
the special place in that relationship occupied by fiction.

* * *

As the first-ever government agency with
deniability written into its charter, the CIA was from the beginning a
storytelling machine. It was no coincidence that in its early days the organization
was full of literature students and writers recruited by influential scholars
of English, or that for decades it operated as perhaps the most generous
literary patron in the West, funding scores of novels, translations and
literary journals. And so it is oddly apt that most Americans know most of what
they know about the covert sector—or, more accurately, half-know most of what
they half-know—not from fact-oriented discourses like journalism, history and
the law, but instead from novels, films, TV shows, comic books and narrative
video games: in other words, through fictions, some of them quite outlandish,
some chock-full of accurate information and insight, most somewhere in between,
and all of them more or less dismissible as “just fiction.”

Melley’s boldest suggestion is that fiction
about the covert activity assumes an outsize role not only for members of the
general public, but also for most individuals within the covert sector. This
is, he argues, a natural consequence of the secret government’s size and
“hypercompartmentalization,” itself a natural outcome of its foundational
obsession with deniability. The covert sector is so large, so fragmented into
agencies, subdivisions, private contractors and shell companies—often competing
with each other for funding and operational jurisdiction—that it can be
difficult, if not impossible, for any one of the beast’s many tentacles to know
what the rest have in their clutches. This is exacerbated by complex
classification schemes that parcel out information—even of a single
operation—piecemeal on a “need to know” basis, a process that can leave even
those with high-security clearances in the dark. Often, Melley claims, those at
the top of the totem pole are the most ignorant of all, because what is required
of them is not knowledge but its opposite: public expressions of shock when,
against the odds, this or that unsavory activity comes to light. Even if those
technically “inside” the covert state know a bit more than John Everyman, it is
certainly plausible that they hanker to know more—to view the monster from
above, and to see its many tentacles writhing at once. Like the rest of us,
some often have nowhere better to turn than fiction.

Such a proposition is difficult to prove, but
Melley attempts to marshal compelling evidence. In the 1960s, he notes, CIA
employees reportedly watchedMission Impossibleeach week in search of ideas for new
gadgets. JFK loved Ian Fleming novels and wanted America to find “our James Bond.”
The “ticking time bomb scenario,” so endlessly invoked in recent debates over
the efficacy and morality of torture, has apparently never occurred in real
life but famously first appeared inLes centurions, a 1960 French thriller in
which French soldiers use torture to extract information from Muslim members of
the Algerian resistance. Today, the book is a favorite of US
counterinsurgency professionals, including (by his own admission) David
Petraeus, until recently the director of the CIA. After 9/11, the Pentagon and
Department of Homeland Security started recruiting artists—â€¨including
thriller author Brad Meltzer—for Red Cell, a project dedicated to imagining how
the terrorist attacks of the future might play out. The Pentagon ran a similar
program. And in 2008, Defense Intelligence Agency recruits started training on
Sudden Thrust, a video game written by a Hollywood
screenwriter.

As has been more widely observed, the
television show24—an eight-season ticking time bomb
scenario—has figured prominently in decidedly nonfictional decisions about the
treatment of Muslims in US
custody since 2001. At a 2002 gathering of government officials charged with
cooking up new approaches to interrogation, the assembled experts concluded
that one useful thing they could do was to watch24.
The show’s hero, Jack Bauer—who gets the job done by beating, drugging or
electrocuting someone roughly every other episode—has been cited with approval
by (to name just a few) Bush administration legal counsel John Yoo, Department
of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, former President Bill Clinton and
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who proclaimed: “Jack Bauer saved Los
Angeles…. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives…. Are you going to convict
Jack Bauer?” After Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs, “Jack Bauer”
became a trending topic on Twitter, with many people tweeting their thanks to
this nonexistent man.

Melley devotes an entire chapter to the
notoriously muddled notion of “brainwashing,” a nonsensical term for a process
of total thought control that has never really existed outside of novels,
movies, and hysterical think-tank studies and news stories about the Communist
threat. Much of the hysteria about brainwashing was stirred up by government PR
specialists: Edward Hunter, the first journalist to use the term, was a former
employee of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of
the CIA. The propaganda affected not only the public but also the
compartmentalized covert sector itself. While one tentacle cooked up stories about
brainwashing—which inevitably seeped into thrillers likeThe
Manchurian Candidate—the other sank millions of dollars into the
search for its antidote, or better yet, a counterweapon. Again and again,
researchers were forced to conclude that there is no such thing as
brainwashing, just old-fashioned torture, most useful not for changing
someone’s mind or turning them into a sleeper agent, but for the age-old
purpose of making someone repeat whatever story you want (or, put otherwise,
for producing fiction under extreme duress).

The findings of this “Manhattan Project of the
mind,” as the historian Alfred McCoy has called it, were collected in the CIA’s
1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, used for years as the
basis for the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE)
training program. After 9/11, the KUBARK manual’s list of torture techniques
was mined no less assiduously than episodes of24for ideas about how to torture men
who, ironically, were often described by Western academics and journalists as
having turned to terrorism as the result of some unbelievably potent, almost
magical form of indoctrination. In 2004, a remake ofThe
Manchurian Candidatereplaced the Commie “hypnosis” of the original
with a suitably futuristic “nanochip” that makes Denzel Washington do whatever
his global overlords say.

* * *

When fact and fiction crossbreed this
promiscuously—especially within a powerful, weaponized bureaucracy—all manner
of disasters are possible. President Eisenhower was on to something when he
complained that intelligence briefings from Tehran sounded “like a dime novel”; much the
same could be said for the scores of kooky terror plots cooked up by FBI agents
for the purpose of entrapping Muslims. But for fiction writers, Melley argues,
the state’s reliance on stories offers a way in. He quotes E.L. Doctorow
approvingly: “The novelist’s opportunity to do his work today is increased by
the power of the regime to which he finds himself in opposition.” The
inaccessibility of key facts is a deep obstacle to journalism, history and
legal inquiry, but not to novels, for which complex realities built from lies
plausible enough to believe in, and rich illusions shot through with facts, are
old news. As Norman Mailer put it, defending his qualifications to write
fiction about the CIA: “It is a fictional CIA and its only real existence is in
my mind, but I would point out that the same is true for men and women who have
spent forty years working within the Agency.”

The literary stars of Melley’s account—the
authors he identifies as best understanding how the nature of the covert sector
creates a particularly “puzzling relation” between representation and
reality—are a familiar bunch. Mailer gets credit for stressing, inHarlot’s
Ghost,the deep
affinities between spycraft and literature, and for explicitly trumpeting
fiction’s unique virtues over journalism in his novelistic memoirArmies
of the Night. Denis Johnson is praised for recasting the Vietnam
War, inTree of Smoke, as first and foremost a
series of propaganda fictions. Doctorow and Robert Coover receive high marks
for their perceptive novelistic treatments of the fiction-laced “spectacle of
secrecy” that was the Rosenberg
trial (retold in Coover’sThe Public Burningand Doctorow’sTheBook
of Daniel).

The more a work is, like our public sphere,
scarred by radical unknowing, the more Melley praises it. His favorite sections
of Don DeLillo’sLibraare
not the detailed reimaginings of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life (or even of his love
for James Bond), but instead the descriptions of Nicholas Branch, the
fictitious CIA analyst brought out of retirement to write the agency’s internal
report on the Kennedy assassination. Day after day Branch sits in his office,
paralyzed by the mounting stacks of papers around him. He has access to any
agency document he requests, but he also knows that a good deal of agency work
goes into destroying some documents and forging others; plus some of his
requests go unanswered. Heshouldknow
more than anyone else about the Kennedy assassination, but in an important
sense he knows less, having lost all ability to distinguish coincidence from
significance, real documents from forgeries, and actual forgeries from forged
forgeries—that is, forgeries deliberately designed to look like forgeries to an
analyst, and so send him down the wrong path.

Similarly, in each of Joan Didion’s three
novels about the security state (A Book of
Common Prayer,DemocracyandThe
Last Thing He Wanted), a narrator sets out to tell the story of a
citizen caught up in the workings of the covert sector and, inevitably,
“instead narrates her own failure to tell the story she meant to tell.” Like
Branch, Didion’s narrators fail in part because they don’t have access to
certain data, in part because they have access to more potentially relevant
data than they could ever sort, and no clue how even to begin telling the
story. The fear is that filling in the covert sector’s narrative gaps—writing a
speculative key to its coded maps—might only serve to obscure the truth. “I
still believe in history,” says the journalist-narrator ofThe
Last Thing He Wanted, then instantly doubles back. “Let me amend
that. I still believe in history to the extent I believe history to be made
exclusively and at random” by men shrouded in “entire layers of bureaucracy
dedicated to the principle that self-perpetuation depended on the ability not
to elucidate but obscure.” In the looking-glass world of the covert sector,
functional stories of cause and effect too easily become part of a cover-up
built on false understanding. The narrator ofDemocracy(one “Joan Didion”), surveying the
story she is in the middle of telling, puts it bluntly: ”I am resisting
narrative here.” Charles Baxter, we can assume, is not a fan.

For Melley, this mode finds its purest
expression in Tim O’Brien’sIn the Lake of the Woods. The main
character, John Wade, is a Vietnam
veteran traumatized by memories of the wartime atrocities he has witnessed,
participated in and covered up through alterations to the record. Decades
later, he wakes up one morning and discovers that his wife is gone. He
remembers little of the night before, but does recall standing over her
sleeping body holding a pot of boiling water. The journalist-narrator is
another Vietnam
vet with problems of memory and guilt. Early on, he announces that he has never
figured the case out and that Wade’s wife was never found. Like DeLillo and
Didion, O’Brien dramatizes the public’s relationship to the half-known
goings-on of the past (“a handful of splotchy images” from Southeast Asia), but
he also gestures toward more recent events, the events of (literally) last
night—events more difficult to name because we experience them, if at all, only
as a queasy awareness of what they might have been. Mistakes are being made.
“Who will ever know?” says the narrator. “It’s all hypothesis, beginning to
end.”

* * *

I admire these books; indeed, some I love, in
part for the virtues Melley catalogs. And his account of their spawning
ground—the “known unknowns” of the covert sector—is fascinating. But his
response to Baxter’s argument in “Dysfunctional Narratives” is deeply
dissatisfying. Baxter’s essay explores how large dysfunctional systems might
influence fiction about subjects other than systems: how distortions of power
subtly discourage artists from writing about power in the first place, whether
or not their subject is explicitly political. To respond, as Melley does, by
noting that an extremely small handful of authors have successfully written
about systems is almost a non sequitur.

What Melley’s account reveals most about his
favorite books is how dismayingly similar they are—and not just in their
self-aware “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” approach to storytelling. Almost every
book he discusses has at its center a character drawn by circumstance into the
dysfunction of the covert sector. InThe Last Thing He Wanted, the narrator
discovers that her father is an arms dealer. InDemocracy,
the main character is having an affair with a CIA agent. Both main characters
inA Book of Common Prayerare
married to prominent players in the secret government. John Wade, the amnesiac
veteran fromIn the Lake of the Woods, is a direct
participant in a military atrocity and the cover-up. The principal narrator of
Coover’sThe Public Burningis Vice President Richard Nixon
himself. DeLillo’s Nicholas Branch works in the belly of the CIA, and his Lee
Harvey Oswald is, well, Lee Harvey Oswald.

This relative uniformity of approach is
evidence of a shortcoming at least as significant as the type pinpointed by
Baxter. It may seem natural that fiction hoping to plumb the conceptual depths
of the covert sector should involve its biggest institutions. But one of
Melley’s central claims is that the nature of the covert sector has contributed
to postmodern shifts in the nature of all public knowledge—not just knowledge
about CIA coups, for example. The authors he spotlights are similarly obsessed
with the idea of the secret services as pockets of the national unconscious.
Here’s the narrator of DeLillo’sThe Names, a man who works for the CIA
but doesn’t know it:

If America
is the world’s living myth, then the CIA is America’s myth. All the themes are
there, in tiers of silence, whole bureaucracies of silence, in conspiracies and
doublings and brilliant betrayals. The agency takes on shapes and appearances,
embodying whatever we need at a given time to know ourselves or unburden
ourselves.

But doesn’t the unconscious find expression in
daily life? By which I mean: Shouldn’t it be possible to write an essentially
realistic novel that contains not a single secret government plot but
nonetheless makes contact with the scars those plots have left on the national
psyche? Other than a few halfhearted pages on John Barth’sLost
in the Funhouse, this possibility merits no real consideration inThe
Covert Sphere. In this regard, the book operates in ignorance of
one of its most important insights: that the work of the covert sector extends
far beyond the confines of the CIA’s offices and involves the uneasy acceptance
of radical unknowing, which comes in an ever-multiplying number of forms and is
a presence in all our lives—even if we’re not paranoiacs who work in the CIA
archives or write newsletters about how 9/11 was an inside job, even if our fathers
are not international arms dealers, even if we are knowing readers of
high-concept novels. Not only that, but Melley’s way of thinking about the
relationship between literature and politics leaves little room for the
possibility that the best novels about 9/11 or World War I or Vietnam could be
ones that do not mention or even bear direct traces of these conflicts.

* * *

There is a basic truth about the covert sector
that is remarkably easy to overlook: however unknowable and mysterious it may
be—however much it may seem to be a separate reality parallel to ours—it is not
literally another world. Remote military outposts, for example, are buildings
like any other, occupying space, requiring plumbing and electricity. Such banal
facts are at the center of fascinating work by Trevor Paglen, whom Melley
mentions only in passing, perhaps because Paglen doesn’t write fiction. His
work is part investigative journalism, part geography, part art photography.
Many of his projects have involved scrounging for information about where
exactly in the physical world the work of the covert state gets done: its
torture dungeons; the remote airports where planes shuttling from dungeon to
dungeon land for fuel; the spots in the night sky where surveillance satellites
lurk; the small offices in strip malls that house CIA shell companies. Then he
gets as close as he can and takes photographs, often using an extremely
high-powered lens. Paglen also trains his camera on smaller traces of covert
activity: leases and purchase orders signed by nonexistent people; uniform
patches for government programs mentioned in no congressional budget.
Encountering these images for the first time, I felt a dizzying sense of
revelation, all the more dizzying because I knew their central claim—that the
covert sector exists in physical space—was completely obvious. I was, I
suppose, metasurprised: surprised to find myself surprised.

There are many such moments in the British
filmmaker Patrick Keiller’s “Robinson” trilogy. Each of its installments consists
almost entirely of static shots of English cities and countryside accompanied
by voice-overs from an invisible narrator who relates the observations of a
London-obsessed loner named Robinson. Keiller’s camera captures lichen growing
on roadway signs; supermarkets, busy intersections and freeways; spiders
spinning cobwebs—and also the British covert sector, in the form of
restricted-access military bases, some still in use and hidden behind fences
and foliage, others deserted and weathered and beginning to be reclaimed by the
land. Keiller is implicitly convinced that it’s all connected, but less in the
manner of a DeLillo paranoiac and more like a nature writer describing a
physical journey through an ecosystem.

Keiller has professed his love for W.G. Sebald’s
1995 novelThe Rings of Saturn, in which the
anonymous narrator (a man not unlike Keiller’s Robinson) describes his walking
tour along the southeast coast of England. In a memorable seven-page
passage he recalls wandering Orford Ness, a small, narrow peninsula that for
much of the twentieth century was owned by the British Ministry of Defense,
which used it to test phosphorus shells, nuclear detonators and who knows what
else. Today its barracks, bunkers, blast chambers and watchtowers sit deserted.
Sebald’s narrator has heard many rumors about the base at Orford Ness and
suspects that much of its past is unknowable, thanks to probable tampering with
the records in advance of their declassification. He acquires no new facts on
his walk. To the contrary: the more he walks, the less he feels he knows.
“Where and in what time I truly was that day…I cannot say, even now as I write
these words.” This sounds like an extreme version of Melley’s “radical
unknowing.” But the passage is also a straightforward account of an afternoon’s
walk, a walk that any Briton with a free afternoon and train fare could take
herself. And so, however much remains hidden to the narrator, he also claims a
modest knowing: he was there; he saw what he could see; he kept walking, kept
thinking.

Whether this meets Baxter’s standard for
functional narrative, I don’t know—but it’s surely at least a modest start. It
seems clear that American letters could use a small army of Paglens, Keillers
and Sebalds roaming our geographies of secrecy, pens and cameras in hand. In
fact, one of the best living describers of the American landscape, John McPhee,
published a fascinating book in 1984 calledLa Place de la Concorde Suisse, in which
he travels around Switzerland
with an army information patrol. In the process he charts the myriad ways the
country’s military aims have shaped its social structures, economy and, most of
all, land. Bridges are wired to blow, the mountains are full of camouflaged
airplane hangars and cannon turrets, and almost every man of fighting age has a
gun, ammo and a gas mask in the house. “There is scarcely a scene in Switzerland
that is not ready to erupt in fire,” McPhee writes. “About this we don’t talk,”
a colonel tells him. “But keep your eyes open. You may see something.”

Also in this issue,Marcy Wheeler inquiresinto whether Congress can protect Americans
against the increasingly invasive security state.

--Prados, John. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the
CIA. Ivan Dee, 2006. Relates the inside stories of covert
operations and examines CIA’s relations with presidents and Congress.

--Schou,
Nick. Kill the Messenger. Nation
Books/Avalon, 2006. Rev. In These Times (Oct.
2006). Life and death of Gary Webb, Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist who revealed how the CIA turned a blind eye to drug
dealing in furtherance of its covert support for
the Nicaraguan
contras. For this report, Webb was
hounded out of journalism and eventually killed himself.

#23

CONTRA/CIA INVASION OF NICARAGUA

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne.
Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War. South End P, 2005. Vol. 3 of her account of the dirty US-backed
war against the people of Nicaragua.

#22

FBI (see: Secrecy)

May, Gary. The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan,
and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo. Yale
UP, 2005. Broadly about secret
government and the misuse of secret agents in particular.

Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside
America's Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
tells the story of how the Bush administration prepared to deal with threats,
both real and perhaps even imaginary. The title of this work comes from
Vice-President Dick Cheney's address to those assembled in the White House
Situation Room - a collection of the best intelligence officers in the
country:If there's a one-percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping
Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty
in terms of our response. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a
preponderance of evidence. It's about our response." And there you have
it, in a nutshell. It was no longer about critical analysis, but about mere
suspicion, and fear mongering.

---Scheuer,
Michael. Imperial Hubris: Why the West
Is Losing the War on Terror. Rev.
Bradley Gitz in ADG, his choice for
the worst book of 2005. “…the latest
evidence of the apparently irresistible urge that some of our citizens feel to
bow and scrape when attacked by savages.”

---The
One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind
In this troubling portrait of the war on terror, America's intelligence agencies
confront not just al-Qaeda but the Bush administration's politicized
incompetence.

---Chernus,
Ira. Monster to Destroy: the Neoconcervative War on
Terror and Sin.

--Mr.
George Soros, a financier, is author of The
Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (Public Affairs,
2006).

**--“Outlawed:
Extraordinary Rendition, Torture, and the Disappearances in the ‘War on
Terror.’” Gillian Caldwell, director and
producer. Another film documentary about
human rights abuses since 1992 by Witness, a Brooklyn,
NY nonprofit. Interview of Caldwell
in In These Times (Nov. 2006).

#23

TERRORISM (see:
Imperialism, Islamic, Torture)
---Kunkel, Benjamin. “Dangerous Characters.” NYT Book Review (Sept. 11, 2005). Reviews many novels about “terrorism”; that
is, individual and small group terrorism; omits state terrorism. Who are the novelists of state terrorism?---Understanding America’s
Terrorist Crisis. Independent Instit.Video featuring Gore Vidal,
Barton Bernstein, Robert Higgs, and Thomas G. Moore and moderated by Lewis
Lapham. Why the US is so hated? Negative consequences of 9-11—curtailment ofcivil liberties20th c. US. Military campaigns against
foreign civilians. Indefensible
corporate welfare. Effects of U.S.
global military presence,
etc. **---Gareau, Frederick. State
Terrorism and the United
States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on
Terrorism. www.claritypress.com
---Honderich, Ted.After the
Terror. McGill-Queens UP, 2004. Praised highly by Chomsky.

Palmer, Monte, and Princess
Palmer. At the Heart of Terror:
Islam, Jihadists, and America’s
War on Terrorism. Rowman &
Littlefield, 2005.

Abbas, Hassan. Pakistan’s
Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror. Sharpe, 2005.

October 30, 2002

WAR ON TERRORISM (see: 9-11)

Achcar, Gilbert. The
Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New
World. Monthly Review P, 2002. Explores dynamics of U.S.
foreign policy in the ME.

Mahajan, Rahul. The
New Crusade: America's
War on Terrorism. Monthly Review P, 2002. Critique of the ideology of the
"war on terrorism; exposes the falsity of the official, mainstream version
of 9-11-causes, context, threat, consequences.